50 Favourite Musicals: 31: ASSASSINS (1990) (Stephen Sondheim)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

First performed: 1990, Playwrights Horizons, US
First seen by me: 1992, Donmar Warehouse, London

Productions seen: four

Score: Stephen Sondheim
Book: John Weidman

Plot:  In a funfair, a shooting-range proprietor calls eight men and women to try their luck at his stall.  They are revealed to be eight misfits who attempted - and in some cases succeeded - in assassinating United States Presidents.

Five memorable numbers: EVERYBODY'S GOT THE RIGHT, THE GUN SONG / THE BALLAD OF CZOLGOSZ, UNWORTHY OF YOUR LOVE, THE BALLAD OF BOOTH, THE BALLAD OF GUITEAU

The collaborations between Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman always give us the unexpected: the coerced opening up of Japan to Western trade in PACIFIC OVERTURES, and the ways to make and lose fortunes in early 20th Century America in ROAD SHOW; but their most avant-garde and controversial musical remains ASSASSINS, a show that challenges it's audience to at least understand four Presidential assassins and five would-be ones.  Short dramatic and black comedy scenes are glued together by Sondheim's score which encompasses styles of Americana music to devastating effect.  Weidman's book presents the assassins' warped manifestos and expose them to be disenfranchised loners who realized that if someone has power and fame then a way to get some of that is to be the person who kills them.  They gather together from across history: John Wilkes Booth, Giuseppe Zangara, Leon Czolgosz, Charles Guiteau, John Hinckley, Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore.  Weidman gives two non-musical scenes to the insane rantings of Samuel Byck, on his way to fly a hijacked plane into Richard Nixon's White House and - in the musical's most chilling scene - the assassins emerge from the shadows of the Texas School Book Depository to make Lee Harvey Oswald realise his destiny  Sondheim's score constantly surprises with it's musical sang-froid - Hinkley and Fromme sing a Carpenters-style love song but with a chilling aspect as they are singing of their deranged love for Jodie Foster and Charles Manson; Guiteau performs a minstrel-style cakewalk as he capers up the scaffold stairs; a Souza march is utilized to counterpoint the bitter ravings of Zangara from the electric-chair that there are no photographers present; a barbershop quartet harmonize over their guns; and the show's narrator, The Balladeer, sings a tongue-twisting bouncy song to illustrate Czolgosz's shuffling progression to the head of a queue to shake hands with William McKinley - and shoot him.  Interestingly The Balladeer presents an echo of Sondheim's previous musical INTO THE WOODS as three-quarters through each show, the characters turn on their narrator, disagreeing with his version of events - here the result is the barnstorming "Another National Anthem" as the assassins show their actions as warped versions of searching for The American Dream.  With it's small cast, minimal set and relatively small number of songs, ASSASSINS has been seen in a few fringe revivals in London - not all of them successful - but my fondest memory is of Sam Mendes' UK premiere production at the Donmar, with excellent, idiosyncratic performances by David Firth (Booth), Louise Gold (Moore), Ciaran Hinds (Byck), and Henry Goodman, unforgettable as the insane Guiteau.  Interestingly, it was for the Donmar production that Sondheim added a song after the Lee Harvey Oswald scene "Something Just Broke" which gives a voice to ordinary people at their shock and sadness of Kennedy's killing; an attempt to re-balance the show which I can understand but think it rather undercuts the show's ominous power.  Those fringe revivals that felt too obvious is why ASSASSINS is placed lower than it ideally should be in my list.

Here is the show's final number, performed by the 2004 Broadway cast including Neil Patrick Harris, Michael Cerveris and Denis O'Hare, at the Tony Awards where it won five awards.  The song, a reprise of the opening number "Everybody's Got The Right" is the most Broadway-sounding song in the score but reiterates Sondheim and Weidman's contention that the assassins' saw their actions as being some sort of unalienable right...  The original 1991 cast recording remains sublime.